The Cri de Jessup Sixty Years Later: Transnational Law’s Intangible Objects and Abstracted Frameworks

This contribution considers Jessup’s vision liberated from its grounding assumption that the transnational arises only to deal with the ad hoc situation when other efforts under the law of a state, any state, fails. The Section “Transnational Law as Manifesto” explores the contemporary approach to transnational law and its more radical possibilities. These possibilities are radical not in the sense of requiring a substantial break with the past but in the sense of suggesting the ways in which Jessup’s vision ultimately requires a shifting of perspectives about the relationship of law to the state, the state to the societal sphere, and both to transnational law and the multinational enterprise. The next Section “Jessup’s Big Bang and Beyond” attempts to move beyond Jessup’s core premise of a situational and ad hoc transnational law as a complement to traditional state based law. The last section, “From Transnational Law to the Law of Transnational Spaces,” considers the parallel development of the problem of transnational law and the transnational enterprise. After 60 years, transnational law remains essentially the law of the in-between, and the enterprise remains the object reified as spatial gap filler in the management of economic relations.